by John Marrs
She caught herself rubbing her stomach and promptly dropped her hands down by her sides. She wasn’t going to allow herself to start showing empathy to a cluster of cells she hadn’t asked for.
Motherhood wasn’t something Flick had given much thought to in her teens, her twenties, or even now. While her friends were moving around the country—and some across the world—to be with their DNA Matches, Flick had made her restaurant her priority. She’d assumed that children would follow once she met her Match, but being linked with a dead serial killer had put paid to that. She had long since come to terms with it never happening for her.
The longer Flick allowed her pregnancy to continue, the more it would slow her down, make her less perceptive, and put the programme at risk. The data and intel she was privy to were more important than the man she had feelings for and the baby she didn’t want.
Remaining so hypervigilant every waking minute since the killings was already taking its toll. So, for much of the day, she tried losing herself in her mindfulness techniques, of self-hypnosis and of just sitting on the beach and becoming lost in the now. But nothing worked; she was still every bit as anxious as when she had seen the results of the first pregnancy test. Perhaps leaving Aldeburgh, even if only for a weekend, might help to clear her mind?
When Grace appeared, Flick had an idea.
CHAPTER 66
EMILIA
A beam of light passing through the car’s passenger window brought the stain to Emilia’s attention. Only when she pulled the wristwatch closer to her face did she realise it was Bruno’s blood. She removed a tissue from the glovebox, dampened it with bottled water, and wiped it away.
Next, she examined her fingernails: there were traces of his blood under them too. She wet her fingertips and began scraping the undersides of the free edges with a paper clip. Deeper and deeper she probed as she replayed Bruno’s final moments. After plunging the metal instrument into his skull, she became aware that his line of vision had fixed upon someone in the distance. Emilia turned and realised they were looking at the same people. It came as such a relief that he too had seen the four figures that had been following her for all these weeks that she wanted to cry. She hadn’t been imagining them.
“You see them, don’t you?” she had asked, and he had given an almost imperceptible nod. “What do they want?” she continued, but Bruno had already journeyed too far into the other side to answer.
Killing him was born out of fury at his laughter and refusal to tell her what she wanted to know. She likened her response to that of a demon from her past shaping itself in the present and taking control of her nature.
What kind of person was I back then if I can kill so easily now? she asked herself. But now was not the time to dwell on her actions in the past or present. “You must set your conscience to one side in your search for the truth,” Adrian had advised her, and that was precisely what she was doing.
Bianca had been the first to open the car door and witness the aftermath of Emilia’s attack. “Well, look who just woke up,” Bianca exclaimed, her arms folded and her mouth beaming. “You’re a fast learner.”
She beckoned two field operatives, who moved quickly and efficiently, bundling Bruno’s body into a waiting van. As the side doors opened, Emilia caught a glimpse of a second body inside, that of the staff member she’d paid to attack Louie.
Something warm and wet returned Emilia to the present. She had dug too deeply when cleaning her fingernails and now her own blood was merging with Bruno’s. She used a tightly pressed tissue to stem it and felt the pressure building inside her once more.
She set the car’s windows to privacy mode so that nobody could see what she was doing inside. Then she opened her mouth wide and screamed as loudly as her lungs would permit. Her body bent double as she struggled to squeeze every inch of air from them. And once empty, she repeated the action.
Her throat and lungs burned like she was swallowing scalding water but she wasn’t ready to stop. Even though the pain was close to unbearable, it still wasn’t enough to eject the demon from inside her.
CHAPTER 67
FLICK, LEICESTERSHIRE
Grace’s car stopped on the horseshoe-shaped driveway of a country house and luxury spa in Leicestershire. A concierge with an androgynous appearance and slicked-back hair, clad in a smart white uniform, removed their luggage, loaded it onto a cart, and programmed it to go to their rooms. Behind them, Grace’s vehicle drove itself away to park and left them to take in their surroundings.
Flick hadn’t realised just how plush the retreat was going to be when she’d asked Grace’s OS to book a spa in the countryside for a weekend getaway. “Wow, just wow,” muttered her friend as the double doors to the entrance opened into a towering grey neolith foyer. Neither could hide her surprise at the grandeur.
Once they had unpacked their luggage in the linked double suite, they put on their slippers and white cotton robes and booked their treatments for the next two days. They passed a group of guests practising tai chi on immaculately cut lawns as they took a leisurely walk around the grounds. Others made use of tennis courts, a giant holographic chessboard, or the eighteen-hole golf course.
“I don’t think I ever want to leave here,” said Grace, drinking it all in. “I don’t mean to pry, but how can you afford to treat both of us on a bar staff’s wages?”
“I have access to funds,” Flick said coyly.
“A lot of funds?”
“I’m comfortable.”
“So why work at the pub? And why are you staying in a chintzy little B&B if you can afford to stay at the Ritz?”
“Aldeburgh doesn’t have a Ritz.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I’m more comfortable being around my kind of people.” Flick chose her words carefully. “And before I arrived there, I’d shut myself away from the world for a very long time. It was a fresh start for me. Now, enough with the questions. I have a hot yoga class to find.”
“Are you sure it’s safe to do it in your condition?” Grace asked.
Flick caught herself just before saying she’d already asked the receptionist privately if it was safe for pregnant women. “My condition?” she repeated.
“You know, being super rich?” Grace chuckled. “You wouldn’t want the gold bullion in your yoga pants to melt in the heat.”
“Oh, you’re hilarious.” Flick feigned a smile as she walked away.
Later, alone, Flick caught herself with the palms of her hands resting against her stomach again. Only now, waiting outside the yoga studio for the class before hers to finish, she allowed them to remain.
As she scanned passing guests, she fixed upon a man sitting opposite her reading a magazine. She was sure they hadn’t met, but there was something vaguely familiar about him. A therapist appeared from behind a closed door and called his name.
It was only as the object of her attention followed the therapist that Flick noticed a mobile phone had fallen from the pocket of his robe and onto the sofa. “Excuse me,” she said, leaning over to pick it up.
A sudden rush of oxygen filled her lungs as she drew a sharp intake of breath. She turned her head to face him, removed her phone from her pocket, and held them side by side. The unbranded silver clamshell devices were identical in every way. They weren’t the only people in the world to own that model, but he was betrayed by his expression. As soon as he saw the phones side by side, he drew his lower lip between his teeth and his eyes bored into hers. Both knew in that moment they had just come face to face with another Minder.
“Follow me, please,” the therapist continued, and led the man to a treatment room.
“Thank you,” he muttered as Flick passed him his phone. And as he left, his head turned to face hers, their eyes still inextricably locked on to one another’s.
CHAPTER 68
CHARLIE, LEICESTERSHIRE
The woman with the telephone identical to Charlie’s did not appear surprised to see him when she opened the door of her suite. They greeted one another with a nod and didn’t speak until Charlie was inside. She gave the corridor the once-over before closing the door behind him and locking it.
Her room was located on the second floor and in the middle of the hotel. She was surrounded by other guests in rooms adjacent to, above, and below hers. Charlie had chosen his and Alix’s room based on the same criteria when they checked in. Less isolation meant less exposure.
After his initial reluctance to spend a weekend away with Alix, Charlie was glad he’d relented. Now as he and his Minder counterpart took up positions on opposite sides of the suite, he swept the room for signs of danger. There was something awkward about where she chose to stand. He remained close to the door, but she had decided against the French windows, a spot he’d have picked if it was his room. Instead, she hovered by a minibar. But once he spotted the ice bucket and pick within her easy grasp, it made sense. He gripped a little tighter against the shaft of the knife hidden in his pocket.
“Where’s your friend?” he began.
“In her room, having an early night.”
“Do you mean you’ve slipped her something to knock her out?” He raised a knowing eyebrow and she looked at her feet. “I’m not clutching at straws, then?” he continued. “You’re like me.”
She nodded. “So how do you want to go about this?” she asked. “Do I tell you my name?”
“No, I don’t think so . . . we’ll have to wing it as the protocol of coming face to face with another Minder wasn’t part of my training.”
“Same here. Let’s keep personal details to a minimum, and that way, after tonight, we can trust one another. Who’s your handler?”
“Karczewski. You?”
She nodded. “Do you know he’s dead?”
“Yes. And I assume you saw what happened to Sinéad?”
The woman nodded again. “I feel awful about that. I wish I’d spotted that use of an extra space earlier, then perhaps she might still be alive.”
“You saved my life. Maybe she made another mistake we don’t know about. It’s easy to do. We have all this stuff in our heads but we’re still human. Look at how I dropped my phone. That was stupid.”
“I almost let one of my secrets slip at a pub quiz night,” she said sheepishly.
“Which one?”
“Princess Diana.”
“The tunnel or the other driver?”
“Neither—the burial spot.”
“Ah.” Charlie nodded. “I almost told my girlfriend why I’m neither agnostic nor an atheist.”
“Oh my God,” she said with a short laugh.
“Which one?”
It was a joke that only they understood. She moved towards a fridge and beckoned him to take a seat on the sofa. Charlie loosened the grip on his knife as she sat opposite him, pouring two glasses of red fruit juice from a jug. He waited until she drank from hers before doing the same.
“It’s days like this when I miss a real drink,” he said.
“I’d kill for a Marlboro Light. Have you tried alcohol since the implant?”
“Yes, but it never ends well. Can I ask . . . have you changed a lot from the person you were before all this?”
She considered the question. “Yes, I don’t think you can go through this process without everything shifting inside you. I’ve realised that everything I know will always keep me at arm’s length from the rest of the world. But it doesn’t mean that I have to shut myself off. I can still have a life, of sorts.”
“A life that’s based on bullshit.”
She appeared surprised by his candour.
“Sorry,” he said. “That was unfair.”
“No, you’re right, I suppose, yes, it is based on lies. But it’s still a better and more truthful life than the one I had before. Now I have a purpose, I have passion, I have a sense of self. I’m . . . happy. For the most part. Or at least I was.”
It wasn’t the answer Charlie had hoped for. He wanted her to admit that she was like him and found it impossible to feel anything, no matter what the provocation. But she was quite the opposite.
Time passed as they discussed some of the sensitive information they carried inside them and what had shocked and appalled them the most. They spoke about the programme itself, the treatment they had undergone, the training and the side effects. Charlie thought he recognised a flicker of disappointment in her when he admitted he didn’t suffer night terrors or multilayered dreams as she did. But he held back from detailing his diminished empathy or the lengths to which he’d gone to kick-start his emotions, such as killing Milo.
“I used to be a bit of a conspiracy theorist before this all began,” Charlie added.
“You must be living the dream with all that you know now.”
“You’d think, wouldn’t you? It doesn’t feel like the dream, though, does it?”
“No. Have you given any thought as to what we’re supposed to do now that our only contact within the programme is dead and there’s no safe house we can trust?”
“There must be a backup plan in place,” he said. “Karczewski will have had deputies or people higher than him pulling his strings who are aware of us. I think our only choice is to sit it out.”
“I don’t know whether I can do that for another four and a half years without knowing what’s going on.”
“Five years is the maximum amount of time it takes for the bead that contains all this data to dissolve into our systems, right? And it will take all the classified information that we know with it. So even if we’re stuck in limbo for that long, there is an end date. But I don’t think it will come to that. Karczewski told me many times that this was a temporary measure until they built an impenetrable fortress around their servers and bunkers. Once that’s done, we’ll have our freedom back again and we’ll be sipping beers on a beach in Barbados for the rest of our lives.”
A noise coming from her friend next door interrupted them. They paused until they heard her toilet flush.
“What does she know about you?” Charlie whispered.
“The same as everyone else—that I don’t like to talk about my past.”
“Is there anyone else you’ve gotten close to?” Charlie picked up on her guilty expression. “I’m the only person you don’t have to lie to,” he added.
“I have a boyfriend and that’s brought with it an unexpected complication . . . I’m pregnant.”
“Shit! Didn’t they put you into temporary sterilisation?”
“Yes, but either my body rejected it or something went wrong.”
“You know you’re supposed to get rid of it, don’t you?”
“It’s not an ‘it,’” she said sharply.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to cause offence.”
“No, I shouldn’t have snapped. I’m just a little confused right now.”
“Are you going to keep it? I mean, the baby?”
She shook her head. “What about you? Is it serious between you and the woman I spotted you with earlier?”
“No.”
“Does she know that?”
The question caught him off-guard. “No, I suppose not.”
“In the end we’re going to hurt everyone around us, aren’t we?”
The question was rhetorical so they sipped from their drinks.
“So now that we know about one another, where do we go from here?” Charlie asked.
“I know there’s usually safety in numbers but I don’t think that’s the case with us.”
“Well, maybe when our five years are up, we’ll meet properly.”
“Yes,” she said. “You can buy me that beer in Barbados.”
Charlie made his way to the door, then stopped
when their phones vibrated in unison. They looked to one another, knowing immediately what it meant. She approached him as he clicked on the red circle in the corner of the screen.
The footage appeared to have been shot inside a vehicle. Two people were present—a man who was restrained and a woman who could only be seen from behind. He appeared to be laughing and she was holding her hands over her ears until she suddenly burst into life. With her face still hidden, she plunged something long and sharp into his head and a thin jet of blood sprayed out like the first oil from a newly tapped well. Moments later, when he was still moving, she carved the name Bruno into his forehead with the same sharp device. The camera focused on the name before the screen went black.
Charlie felt his fellow Minder’s hand gripping his arm as her eyes snapped to meet his. She was horrified by what she was watching, but he was not. He had to pretend.
“You should leave,” she said, and moved to open the door. Charlie followed her, but before he left, she grabbed hold of him.
“Stay safe,” she whispered in his ear, and hugged him tightly, only letting go when she spotted someone standing behind him.
CHAPTER 69
CHARLIE, LEICESTERSHIRE
Alix cleared clothes from a chest of drawers and a wardrobe rail, tossing them into her suitcase.
“Please don’t be like this,” Charlie said, but even he recognised the apathy in his tone.
“Who is she?” Alix asked.
“It’s not important.”
“I saw you in the spa together and then you spend an hour in her bedroom and you tell me it’s ‘not important’?”
“It wasn’t that long, was it?”
“I should know because I was standing in the corridor outside waiting for my boyfriend to come out!”
